The House Of Mirth And Miss Van Osburgh

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The House of Mirth is a novel written by Edith Wharton, who earned her fame essentially through her two books, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence. She was born to a distinguished New York family and married wealthy banker Edward Wharton in 1885. After her marriage, she started to write stories among turn-of-the-century New York society, and by 1905, she finished writing The House of Mirth. This book begins around 1890s where everything women do were still restricted in many ways. Because Wharton observed societies like these throughout her life, she well identifies hypocrisy of the society she’s observing.
“The couple in question were engaged in the same kind of romance… Miss Van Osburgh was a large girl with flat surfaces and no high lights: Jack …show more content…

This quote is important because it directly shows Wharton’s observation and likewise, it is the overall theme of the novel, a hypocritical society. Wharton maintains a sense of perspective while portraying the readers she knows very well. Her writing style is simple and controlled. Her choice of vocabulary and sentence structure is illusory. Here, we can tell she refrains from using unnecessary modifiers and her descriptions seem to be almost elliptical. For instance, she writes “His own taste was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable…” in page 51. She chooses adjectives and adverbs carefully and uses them intermittently. Though many years has passed since Wharton’s years, her quote still tells me a lot about life filled with hypocrisy. The phrase “…reliable as roast mutton…” directly shows what I believe as Wharton’s observation of absurdity; this phrase shows the absurdity of money-driven marriages. The phrase alone may make readers believe it is just a happening, but each characters’ behaviors confirm that it is what their lives are, lives filled with ostentation and

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